Day: May 2, 2016

Understanding the cocktail of chemicals that fuel our consciousness By Jacob Devaney / 04.28.2016 As we dive into the complex and beautiful neurochemical cocktail that fuels our brains, serotonin is a bit of an enigma. Research shows that serotonin plays an important role in regulating mood, appetite, sleep, and dreaming. It can have both a sedating or stimulating effect and this is somehow related[…]

Coffee: Is it good for you or bad for you? The New York Times Magazine reported that by drinking moderate amounts of coffee, you might reduce your chances of developing type-2 diabetes, dementia, and certain types of cancer—and even, perhaps, live longer. Yet evidence also suggests that coffee can affect women’s estrogen levels, raise blood[…]

Image Courtesy of Target By Matthew A. McIntosh / 05.02.2016 Brewminate Editor-in-Chief Not much needs to be said here – the videos speak for themselves. These Christians in Oregon and Tennessee went into Target stores to express their absolute outrage at Target’s LGBT-friendly policies and to let everyone know they would be burning in a[…]

Rev. Daniel Berrigan in 1995. (Getty/Chris Felver) By Rev. John Dear / 05.02.2016 Rev. Daniel Berrigan, the renowned anti-war activist, award-winning poet, author and Jesuit priest, who inspired religious opposition to the Vietnam War and later the U.S. nuclear weapons industry, died at age 94, just a week shy of his 95th birthday. He died[…]

Photo from Old Navy ad By Matthew A. McIntosh / 05.02.2016 Brewminate Editor-in-Chief Old Navy ran a new advertisement online over the weekend featuring a multiracial family. This was apparently too much for the bigoted among us who decided to register their discontent online and promise never to grace the doors of Old Navy again.[…]

Greatly influential on Western impressions of India, the ancient greeting namaste has since been exploited by that country’s tourism industry for the purpose of attracting Western visitors, who have been sold on the idea that their impressions will be made real by compliant natives. By Ansh Patel Originally a Sanskrit greeting, namaste had long been[…]

Frankenstein observing the first stirrings of his creature. Engraving by W. Chevalier after Th. von Holst, 1831. Featured as frontispiece to the 1831 edition of Shelley’s novel Source: Wellcome Library. Professor Sharon Ruston surveys the scientific background to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, considering contemporary investigations into resuscitation, galvanism, and the possibility of states between life and[…]

The Starbucks Coffee at Universal CityWalk Hollywood / BrokenSphere, Wikimedia Commons By Matthew A. McIntosh / 05.02.2016 Brewminate Editor-in-Chief A lawsuit has been filed against Starbucks on behalf of one Stacy Pincus in Chicago. The complaint is that too much ice is put into iced drinks and thereby reduces the actual volume of the liquid[…]

Novelist Ayelet Waldman and a Palestinian man in Hebron. “For most of my life, I loved Israel, I longed for Israel, I planned to live in Israel,” she says. / Oren Ziv By Daniel Estrin / 05.02.2016 Bestselling author Ayelet Waldman has been called America’s most outrageous writer for her frank books and essays on motherhood.[…]

Silver penny from the reign of King Æthelred / Credit: Fitzwilliam Museum Aethelred II, Helmet type, Cambridge, Cnit CM.33-1935 He was just a boy when he became King of the English and his reign was marked by repeated attacks by the Danes. Æthelred, who died 1,000 years ago on 23 April 1016, is remembered as[…]

Imagined view from the surface of one of the newly discovered planets, with ultracool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 in the background. ESO/M. Kornmesser By Dr. Adam Burgasser Professor of Physics University of California, San Diego The search for Earth-like planets – and life – beyond the solar system has long been the stuff of science fiction[…]